Alfred-Maurice de Zayas: Peace and Human Rights Historian and Poet

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Alfred-Maurice de Zayas (born 31 May 1947 in Havana, Cuba) is an American lawyer, writer, historian, poet, a leading expert in the field of human rights, as well as a former high-ranking United Nations official. He is currently a professor of international law at the Geneva School of Diplomacy and International Relations, and was formerly a senior lawyer with the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Secretary of the Human Rights Committee, and the Chief of Petitions. He practised law in New York as an associate in the law firm Simpson Thacher & Bartlett from 1970 to 1974, specializing on corporate law, and is also a retired member of the Florida Bar.

De Zayas has written and lectured extensively on human rights, including the jurisprudence of the United Nations Human Rights Committee, the Armenian Genocide, the Holocaust, the US-run detention centers at Guantanamo Bay, "ethnic cleansing" in the former Yugoslavia, the expulsion of Eastern European Germans after the Second World War, the invasion of Cyprus by Turkey in 1974,the rights of minorities and indigenous peoples. He is an advocate of "the right to homeland" as a universal human right, and of the human right to peace.While de Zayas' literary output and his international law and human rights publications are mainstram, his peace activism has rendered him somewhat controversial in the United States.Since his retirement from the UN in 2003, de Zayas has become a vocal critic of the Iraq war, indefinite detention in Guantanamo, secret CIA prisons, nuclear pollution, and extreme poverty. He has chastised the United States, Great Britain, and Germany for their lack of intellectual honesty and their lip service to human rights.